The role of security exceptions in international investment law

This thesis examines national security/essential security exceptions in the context of international investment law (IIL). Security exceptions in IIL had not received attention prior to Argentina’s invocation of essential security exceptions to legitimise its emergency measures against its economic crisis. Consequently, the Argentine cases shed light on the scope of security measures in the IIL arena in that it raised a question as to whether a measure to tackle an economic crisis could fall within the ambit of essential security interests. Although security has been generally understood as closely associated with national defence, i.e. military security, factors, such as the emergence of new security threats, including energy dependence, economic crisis, and environmental catastrophes, have also affected the scope of security measures against foreign investors. While the tribunals of the Argentine cases regarded economic security as imperative as military security, they did not clearly delineate the scope of legitimate security measures. Therefore, in this thesis, I seek to investigate this limitation and to provide a solution to it by applying insights from critical security studies, which highlight the evolution and broadening of security, into IIL. By applying critical security studies into the IIL arena, this thesis critiques tribunals’ interpretation of security exceptions and also explores the implications of the broadening of security that would affect the regulatory space of host states and thereby the interests of foreign investors. The types of foreign investors subject to the potential implications, as a result of the broadening of security, encompass corporate foreign investors, government-controlled foreign investors, and individual foreign investors. Thus, this thesis examines whether each type of foreign investors has distinct security considerations and thus is subject to a different degree of scrutiny in terms of security interests. The thesis argues that a newly delineated scope of security can also contribute to adjusting the dynamics between host states and foreign investors. As the IIL system has developed heavily focusing on the attraction of foreign capital, this has led the system to fail to highlight the importance of the regulatory space of host states. While the concept of national security takes fundamental part in national policies and the role of exceptions in IIL is pivotal to secure policy-space of host states, the efficacy of current security exceptions in IIL can be controversial given the strict conditions for their invocation. Therefore, the application of a broadened notion of security can help host states to secure their policy space in order to tackle a serious and urgent threat to national security. Yet, the broadening of security does not signify an unlimited expansion of the concept for the legitimacy of security measures

Wearable Computing for Defence Automation : Opportunities and Challenges in 5G Network

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Mutant pattern of p53 predicts local recurrence and poor survival rate in gastric cancer

Background. TP53 mutation is a poor prognostic factor for various organ malignancies such as colorectal cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, lung adenocarcinoma and clinical pathologists previously evaluated it using immunohistochemistry for p53. The clinicopathologic significance of p53 expression in gastric cancer remains unclear due to inconsistent classification methods. Methods. Immunohistochemistry for p53 protein was performed using tissue microarray blocks generated from 725 cases of gastric cancer, and p53 expression was divided into three staining patterns using a semiquantitative ternary classifier: heterogeneous (wild type), overexpression, and absence (mutant pattern). Results. Mutant pattern of p53 expression had a male predominance, greater frequency in cardia/fundus, higher pT stage, frequent lymph node metastasis, local recurrence clinically, and more differentiated histology microscopically compared with wild type. In survival analysis, p53 mutant pattern was associated with worse recurrent-free survival and overall survival rates, and significance was maintained in subgroup analysis of early versus advanced gastric cancers. In Cox regression analysis, p53 mutant pattern was a significant predicting factor for local recurrence (relative risk (RR=4.882, p<0.001)) and overall survival (RR=2.040, p=0.007). The p53 mutant pattern remained significant for local recurrence (RR=2.934, p=0.018) in multivariate analyses. Conclusions. Mutant p53 pattern on immunohistochemistry was a significant prognostic factor for local recurrence and poor overall survival in gastric cancer

Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and risk of colorectal cancer:an age-stratified analysis

Background and aims: the role of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) in prevention of early-onset colorectal cancer (CRC) in young adults under 50 years is uncertain. We evaluated the age-stratified associations (&lt;50 vs. ≥50 years) :circulating 25(OH)D levels and the risk of CRC in a large sample of Korean adults.Methods: our cohort study included 236,382 participants (mean [standard deviation] age, 38.0 [9.0] years) who underwent a comprehensive health examination, including measurement of serum 25(OH)D levels. Serum 25(OH)D levels were categorized as follows: &lt;10, 10–20, and ≥20 ng/mL. CRC, along with the histologic subtype, site, and invasiveness was ascertained through linkage with the national cancer registry. Cox proportional hazard models were used to estimate hazard ratios (HRs; 95% confidence intervals [CIs]) for incident CRC according to the serum 25(OH)D status, with adjustment for potential confounders.Results: during the 1,393,741 person-years of follow-up (median, 6.5 years; interquartile range, 4.5–7.5 years), 341 participants developed CRC (incidence rate, 19.2 per 105 person-years). Among young individuals aged &lt;50 years, serum 25(OH)D levels were inversely associated with the risk of incident CRC with HRs (95% CIs) of 0.61 (0.43–0.86) and 0.41 (0.27–0.63) for 25(OH)D 10-19 and ≥20 ng/mL, respectively, with respect to the reference (&lt;10 ng/mL) (p for trend &lt;0.001, time-dependent model). Significant associations were evident for adenocarcinoma, colon cancer, and invasive cancers. For those aged ≥50 years, associations were similar, although slightly attenuated compared to younger individuals. Conclusions: serum 25(OH)D levels may have beneficial associations with the risk of developing CRC for both early-onset and late-onset disease. <br/

Continuous Autonomous Ship Learning Framework for Human Policies on Simulation

Considering autonomous navigation in busy marine traffic environments (including harbors and coasts), major study issues to be solved for autonomous ships are avoidance of static and dynamic obstacles, surface vehicle control in consideration of the environment, and compliance with human-defined navigation rules. The reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, which demonstrates high potential in autonomous cars, has been presented as an alternative to mathematical algorithms and has advanced in studies on autonomous ships. However, the RL algorithm, through interactions with the environment, receives relatively fewer data from the marine environment. Moreover, the open marine environment causes difficulties for autonomous ships in learning human-defined navigation rules because of excessive degrees of freedom. This study proposes a sustainable, intelligent learning framework for autonomous ships (ILFAS), which helps solve these difficulties and learns navigation rules specified by human beings through neighboring ships. The application of case-based RL enables the participation of humans in the RL learning process through neighboring ships and the learning of human-defined rules. Cases built as curriculums can achieve high learning effects with fewer data along with the RL of layered autonomous ships. The experiment aims at autonomous navigation from a harbor, where marine traffic occurs on a neighboring coast. The learning results using ILFAS and those in an environment where random marine traffic occurs are compared. Based on the experiment, the learning time was reduced by a tenth. Moreover, the success rate of arrival at a destination was higher with fewer controls than the random method in the new marine traffic scenario. ILFAS can continuously respond to advances in ship manufacturing technology and changes in the marine environment

Semantic Reasoning with Contextual Ontologies on Sensor Cloud Environment

This research first focused on processing enormous number of sensor events from a variety of city-wide sensor networks. As a solution, the well-known big data handling scheme, Hadoop cluster framework, drew, unquestionably, our attention. The acquired sensor events are to be used to immediately detect a certain abnormal situation within the framework. Accordingly, we integrated our existing context-aware collaboration framework with Hadoop cluster framework by interfacing data collection and context-aware reasoning parts of the existing framework with the Hadoop cluster framework. This approach enabled us to effectively process massive sensor events and semantically analyze the big data within the cluster environment. The proposed smart city sensor cloud framework provides ontology-enabled semantic reasoning scheme with the XOntology in combination with the Context-Aware Inference (CAI) model. By applying the ontology technology, the proposed framework enhances the availability and interoperability of the contextual information across many cooperating parties according to semantic reasoning results. Further, this framework is flexible enough to integrate any heterogeneous platforms including many existing IT solutions as well as mobile platforms. In addition, this approach presents the direction of progressive migration of many existing sensor network solutions into big data handling sensor cloud framework

Policy Making in Foreign Language Teaching towards Globalization: the Act on the Promotion of Education of Critical Foreign Languages in Korea

This study focuses on the implications of the enactment of the Act on the Promotion of Education of Critical Foreign Languages in Korea. This act is a legal institutionalization of the state’s responsibilities for and roles of teaching less commonly taught foreign languages. Foreign language education policy in the country has focused on English and a few major foreign languages. However, the Korean government came to realize the importance of teaching numerous languages that had been considered minor ones to cope with “glocalization”. With the enactment of this Act, the Korean government officially recognized the importance of education related to various foreign languages within its legal framework for public education. The objective of this study is to review the background and outline of the Act and examine the implementation of the projects associated with it. This paper also discusses the expected effectiveness of the Act for teaching diverse foreign languages and issues in the implementation process

Horizon Targeted Loss-Based Diverse Realistic Marine Image Generation Method Using a Multimodal Style Transfer Network for Training Autonomous Vessels

Studies on virtual-to-realistic image style transfer have been conducted to minimize the difference between virtual simulators and real-world environments and improve the training of artificial intelligence (AI)-based autonomous driving models using virtual simulators. However, when applying an image style transfer network architecture that achieves good performance using land-based data for autonomous vehicles to marine data for autonomous vessels, structures such as horizon lines and autonomous vessel shapes often lose their structural consistency. Marine data exhibit substantial environmental complexity, which depends on the size, position, and direction of the vessels because there are no lanes such as those for cars, and the colors of the sky and ocean are similar. To overcome these limitations, we propose a virtual-to-realistic marine image style transfer method using horizon-targeted loss for marine data. Horizon-targeted loss helps distinguish the structure of the horizon within the input and output images by comparing the segmented shape. Additionally, the design of the proposed network architecture involves a one-to-many style mapping technique, which is based on the multimodal style transfer method to generate marine images of diverse styles using a single network. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method preserves the structural shapes on the horizon more accurately than existing algorithms. Moreover, the object detection accuracy using various augmented training data was higher than that observed in the case of training using only virtual data. The proposed method allows us to generate realistic data to train AI models of vision-based autonomous vessels by actualizing and augmenting virtual images acquired from virtual autonomous vessel simulators